Below is a rough comparison of contemporary Global Warming and estimates of past temperature change. This is a visualization in the vein of this plot on Wikipedia. Uncertainties increase substantially as estimates go back further in time. Time resolution also decreases further back in time so much of the high-frequency climate variability seen more recently would presumably also exist in the more distant past but is not detectable. Sources of data are below.

Hi Paul, Thanks for this. I am aware of the controversy surrounding the “uptick” in the Marcott et al. reconstruction. In the graphic I produced, it defaults to using the instrumental data since 1880. So it essentially throws out Marcott et al.’s uptick and only uses the portion of the reconstruction that looks the same as in the PhD thesis.